I suppose I should have written this piece when the whole brouhaha about the Frank Thomas commercial was going on. Unfortunately I didn't think of it until just now.

These Blue Jays commercials have been on for, what, a season and change now? Something like that? I thought I understood them, but it wasn't until I started thinking about the Frank Thomas one that I really understood them. Here's what I used to think:

A long time ago, certainly more than ten years ago, I read an article in the Globe and Mail. Most of the details of it are lost to my memory, but it was written by some guy who knew a thing or two about advertising, and had taken some kind of very enlightening course in university that gave him this key insight: in any advertisement, you get two messages. You get the message that the advertisers want to send to you, naturally, but you also get the message that they really really don't want to send to you. That second message, the one thing they above all don't want you to think, will come through loud and clear if you just look for it, because they can't help but include it in their commercial on some level.

The example the guy gave was the ad campaign for Windows 95, which featured the song 'Start Me Up'. Obviously, the ad was trying to highlight how innovative, useful, easy and cool Windows 95 was, but they undercut this message by pairing it with a song that contained the lyric, "You'll make a grown man cry."

Now, it's possible to get all dialectic and Hegelian about this, and say that it's just one more example of how anything will contain the seeds of its own antithesis within it, and out of that will come the full synthesis, which in this case is the customer's understanding of the product. I didn't interpret it on that level, though; I took it as more of a psychological thing, like there's something about the nature of advertising that makes people subconsciously undercut their surface intentions. In any case, the article stayed with me, and every time a commercial catches my attention I try to figure out what it's trying not to say but saying anyway.

Which brings us back to these Blue Jays commercials. Which ones were there in the first batch... there's the one where Troy Glaus knocks a pinata out of the backyard, the one where Vernon Wells hides in a dumpster, the one where Roy Halladay knocks a beehive down on a bunch of kids... The way I looked at these commercials, the main message was that the Jays couldn't stop competing. Obviously, this is a virtue for a professional athlete, so it's all reasonable so far. But the hidden message was this: The Toronto Blue Jays hate children.

I'm not saying that the Jays do hate children, of course; that would be ridiculous. I'm saying that that's the one thing they don't want anybody to think about them, and therefore it's the one thing that their commercials conveyed to us between the lines. Because, come on! Glaus ruins a birthday party when he finds the bleachers with the pinata. Wells ruins a game of hide and seek by hiding someplace too far away for a kid to look for him. Halladay gets some kids stung by bees. Frank Thomas smashes another kid across the room. What else are we supposed to conclude?

That's what I used to think, anyway; I thought it was a very strange and ill-advised kind of ad campaign. But now I realize that I had it all wrong.

What those ads are really all about is this idea: the Blue Jays are kids.

Look at all the stuff the Jays do in these commercials, and imagine that, instead of athletes, we've got other kids doing or saying all these things. It seems natural! Not only that, it disarms the commercials, takes any suggestion of malice or menace out. The commercials all feature different Blue Jays acting like kids.* Which is a brilliant thing to do, and not only because baseball needs to increase its fanbase of young people.

See, most of the Blue Jays belong to Generation X (born 1961-1981). Not all, but most. And Generation X has a bad public image. Always has had, always will have. On the other hand, most kids today, including all the ones featured in these commercials, belong to the Millennial generation (born 1982-1999?). And the Millennials get much better press (and usually for a good reason). (See this site for more on these points.) So to cast the Jays as Millennials rather than GenXers... that's pretty smart. I don't know if the advertising works, but it's sure worth a try.

Thoughts?

*Well, most of them do. There was one I just heard featuring Vernon Wells and an astrology hotline. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it, but it didn't have anything to do with kids.